Six people were slightly hurt when a plane skidded off a runway at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport while landing during a snowstorm yesterday.

The aircraft crashed through a chain-link fence and came to rest with its nose perilously close to the edge of an icy bay.

Photos showed the nose of the plane resting on a barrier which separates the runway from Flushing Bay. Passengers saddled with bags and bundled up in heavy coats and scarves slid down an inflated chute to safety on the snowy tarmac.

Delta Air Lines Flight 1086 from Atlanta, with 125 passengers and five crew members on board, veered off the runway at around 11.10am local time, authorities said. Six people suffered non-life-threatening injuries, said Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport.

Emergency responders yesterday evening were still assessing people, and one person was seen getting into an ambulance at the airport. Images showed the plane resting in several inches of snow. Passengers trudged through the snow in an orderly line after leaving the plane.

Emergency personnel attend the plane in New York City yesterday. Photo: Reuters

Michael J Moritz Jr, a well-known Broadway producer, said he was commenting on the heavy snow on the runway when he saw the plane come in for a landing.

“Landing looked normal, didn’t look abnormally rough at all,” he wrote in an email. “Once on the ground, the plane lost control very quickly, visibility was low.”

Pentangelo said the plane is apparently leaking fuel.

The Delta flight was landing on LaGuardia’s main runway – a stretch of tarmac that is 2,134m long and 46m wide. On the right hand side of the runway are a taxiway and the airport terminals. On the left is a barrier, fence and Flushing Bay. In 2005, a safety buffer was added to the end of the runway at LaGuardia, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It was updated last year. Called an engineered material arresting system, the buffer is typically a crushable material that can extend 305m beyond the runway. It is designed to slow or stop a plane which overruns, undershoots or veers off the side of the runway. A plane’s tyres sink into the lightweight material and the aircraft slows as it rolls through it.

In the case of Flight 1086, it appears that the jet did not end up in the buffer zone but instead veered off the runway and into the barrier separating the airport from Flushing Bay.

LaGuardia is one of the most congested airports in the US. It is also one of the more difficult ones to land at because of its close proximity to three other busy airports. When rain or snow reduces visibility, the number of landings slows down. The same occurs during high winds.

John M Cox, who spent 25 years flying for US Airways and is now chief executive of consultancy Safety Operating Systems, notes that LaGuardia’s runway is “reasonably short” but still safe. At airports with longer runways, pilots will glide a few feet above the runway and gently touchdown. At LaGuardia, “you put the airplane on the ground and stop it”.

“You’re concentrating on getting your plane on the runway and stopped,” said Mr Cox.

The airport has had its share of plane mishaps. In July 2013, the front landing gear of a Southwest Airlines flight arriving at the airport collapsed immediately after the plane touched down on the runway, sending the aircraft skidding before it came to a halt. Ten passengers suffered minor injuries. Federal investigators found that the jet touched down on its front nose wheel before the sturdier main landing gear touched down.